Now here’s the kind of news that really doesn’t inspire any faith at all in the gaming audience when it comes to Early Access titles. Hawken Entertainment recently announced that they will be shutting down the servers for Hawken, the first-person mech shooter, come January 2nd, 2018.

Blues spotted the news over on the official Steam community page, where they rolled out the sad news for the game that never graduated from Early Access. In fact, the last update for the game was from back on May 24th, 2017 where the developers talked about finally graduating from Early Access through a “soft launch” period. However, the game never reached its final destination and instead has stayed nestled in the purgatory of Early Access since it debuted in the program back on February 14th, 2014, three years ago.

The statement from the developers reads…

“After 3 great years, we are shutting down the PC Steam servers to refocus our development efforts. The PC game will officially be removed on January 2, 2018, and all DLC and purchasable content will also be unavailable starting today.”

Well at least they decided to shut down all DLC purchases. Some developers keep the cash shop open right up until the twilight of the game’s closing.

This move isn’t too surprising given that the community slowly began turning on them anyway, with the reviews moving from “Positive” into the “Mixed” territory.

Gamers basically saw the writing on the wall well before the developers announced that they would killing off support for the mech-shooter.

Much like Huxley, Hawken never really managed to gain decent ground with the community because it was either perpetually delayed and couldn’t gain any marketing momentum, or by the time it did become available better games like Titanfall were already made available.

It did feature some okay modes, such as co-op bot destruction, and missile assault, in addition to the standard team deathmatch modes, but overall it was just one of those games that was too little, too late.

The Early Access description also doesn’t even properly explain how long the developers planned to stay in Early Access. At this point they’re three years in and still struggling with the beta… well, at this point the game will never leave beta because it’s shutting down in January of 2018.

Given that Hawken is free-to-play, if you ever wanted to know what the game was like, you can give it a try on the Steam store before the servers shut down for good. It’s not like you would be losing anything… except for maybe bandwidth.